The sun shines hard on the thick blades of crabgrass whose roots carve deep into the hard dog-pissed soil while the seven year cicadas play high, heavenly strings in search of a dying mate. In the speckled shade of a young cedar elm a small day old bird has fallen from its nest and is crying. The freshly mowed grass is crying too; one million blades cropped to the shoulder on one fifth of an acre and then a brown stained fence between another stiff fifth and they are all drowned out easily by the low fierce whir of dark green ac units cooling homes spaced as evenly apart. Every home with the same brown fence, every home with the same grey driveway, every home with the same blue sky, every home with the same small elm planted, and it will be twenty-five years and three new owners before children swing from the branches. And by then they will be too old.

Two thin alien prongs peek over a headless dandelion stalk in the lawn of home number three thousand and sixty eight. Dark brown bulb tipped feelers flinching in the wind and then guiding the host forward on a path glowing with the small bird’s scent. A living meal so large is a rare thing in this stale green habitat. The ant traces out the dying chick who’s unformed wing is crushed and mangled and soon it is racing home to a one square foot dirt mound. In the Brazilian jungles of its ancestors, billion strong populations live in towering castles but here, in the mono system of grass, the ants have taken cue from the real estate developers of Donahough & Mink and live in scattered city states with war-ladies whose children battle fiercely over the shrinking plots of land. When the messenger arrives to mound three hundred thousand six hundred and eighty, the army ranks are ready and their mandibles go chomping down the trail laid in pheromones. The messenger was not lying, and when they arrive the soft pink eyes of the infant bird are still sewn shut, its rubbery appendages jerking sharply without direction. The front phalanx (there are thousands of them now) move forward to hack off small light portions of flesh and coordinate their hauling back to the underground nest but as the first few soldiers begin to bite the earth begins to shake and the crabgrass bows beneath new shade as a giant the size of the sun stoops over the small corpse and a humbling hand reaches down and scoops up the body, pursed lips sending waves of ant soldiers sailing four feet back down to the earth with its breath.

“Look!”

The child’s breath is as warm as the bird.

“The ants were just stingin’ him but I shook ‘em all off and look I saved it.”

The boy held the small bird carefully in both hands and then hurried to his father who was sunbathing, eyes closed against the heat, the heel of his right foot dragging slowly back and forth over a deep crack in the concrete patio. It had been poorly laid by friends of the first family to live in this home, before one August day Mr. Saul Leynes shook hands with the bank man, the middle man got his cut, and at six percent interest the Leynes family had a thirty year mortgage on a home that would hardly last for thirty five.

“You find that in the yard? Here, let me see.”

Saul propped himself up in the chair and he made sure to let the smoke from his backwood blow south – away from the open living room window – as he leaned in closer to inspect his sons find.

“It’s a little chick bud. And it’s dying, must have blown out of the nest this morning.”

“I’m gonna show mommy”, the boy said, “last week she read a book about how a man healed a sparrow, and then the sparrow was Jesus and they both went to heaven. Maybe this one’s an angel.”

Saul Jr’s face was flush with the heat, and his eyes were fixed wide because it was a heavy thing to hold an angel (dying at that) in ones hands for the very first time.. 

“No”, Saul said flatly, “Mommy won’t want that in the house. Not while she’s cleaning.”

Rachel Leynes was stooped over in the mud room unloading still-sweating laundry from a dryer with a filter caked in lint. The house got nearly tropical on laundry days, and the air conditioning strained to keep it cooled to seventy five degrees. She stopped to rest her aching spine, her face flushed by a wave of heat, and she called without hope for the older children to come get their folded clothes. They were busy, as all teenagers always are. Rosedoing slow, methodical algebra in her room painted mauve, Carlmasturbating quietly at the family computer with the office door ajar and left ear listening keenly for approaching footsteps. And Rachel knew and did not mind. She did not mind that she was inside and Saul was not. Keeps me out of the sun, I’d rather trim the carpet than do yard work outside, she’d tell others. It had been a choice of course, Saul gave her the option. I’ll work and do chores, you can work if you’d like. But the children had always hung over his head in his favor, even before they were born.  And now they tipped down the scale and Rachel just felt like she was overheating. It had been ten years since her last breath of fresh air.

But outside the air was just as heavy and a sparrow flying overhead had to flap her wings twice as hard to return to the elm tree nest, a fat grub between her beak. Two grotesque little bodies thrust up their necks screaming, their still-forming organs visible beneath translucent hide and shooting stars of little capillaries streaking on their skin. Their mouths yawed open and if you looked at one from above you’d see nothing but a small circular void that swallowed up itself. Feed me feed me feed me and she fed them and went away. She had never learned to count and would not miss her dying chick.

“But we gotta save it”. Saul Jr. paused and set his chin up high before looking to his father. He’d rather his mother help him, because she knew how to save things. Just last week when Carlhad been sick, she’d filled a small glass of water, poured in white powder that fizzed the drink up, and then knelt to the floor and spoke in the angel’s language. Smooth melds of vowel and consonants that peaked and crested in sing-song cadence. And then the next day Carlhad felt better, thanking Jesus at breakfast because it was his turn to pray. His father did not know how to save things. Ask him a question and wait what kind of seemed like ages for an answer and when it came it was the sort that reminds a child of how little they know. What’s the smoke behind the car doing? It’s killing the planet. What’s the con-struck-shun man doing? Working, so he doesn’t have to die. What’s Pastor Carsen saying? To give him your money or else you’ll die. Then mommy would smack him and he’d smile and give a fake answer. But his eyes in the review mirror would find him and tell him the truth.

“It’s left arm got bit by the fire ants, maybe we put him back and his mommy will fix him?”

“No” Saul answered, “it’s mother will smell you now. if you put it back she’ll just push it out. Or not feed it and let it starve.”

This was a new possibility and Saul Jr’s eyes drew down the most thoughtful-like he could manage, weighing this new thread of reality within the context of the time he had been caught passing notes in church and then left out of after-church ice cream. Watching as Rose and Carl licked up their dairy queen ice cream cones and ate small, important bites out of a banana split. His banana split.

“Here let me see it.”

Saul took the small dying thing from his son’s outstretched hands. The bird was still warm with life – not yet fully cooked by the hot Texas sun – and it twitched wearily against the callouses on the edges of his palms.  He did not look Saul Jr. in the eyes.

“Come with me.”

It was serious then, and father followed by son walked wordlessly over to the corner shade of the one story house where the bare brown earth still oozed with mud from the morning’s sprinkler run. Each step a little clay skate rink maker that on less serious days Saul Jr. would enter with a little leap, the ball of his foot striking the imprint and the sliding up until his toes met his fathers and then he’d leap to the next.

There was a time (not too far off depending on the branch you took down the family tree) when the snuffing of a life weighed heavy with meaning. It was rare, but common enough so that mothers took their daughters to learn to tend hopelessly to the act, and fathers took sons to partake in the ritual. And there was a time still before that, long since forgotten by even Saul’s father’s father, when death was so common and casual there did not need to be a ritual at all. But now, in the never ending suburb, death was foreign and when fathers still tried to do as their own had and enlighten their sons, they found that they themselves had still never really learned how to account it. And this was such a time.

Eyes wide and glistening, the child watched as his father took out a plastic grocery bag from his back pocket, unused from the dog’s morning walk (a big, stinking dog that nobody in the family really even wanted but had because that’s what happy families do), placed the bird inside and then tied it up in a knot. Then in the time the child was blinking he flicked out his wrist and the bag snapped through the air and there was a tiny whack on the brick siding. And a small blot of blood squeezed out a hole in the corner, smearing out against the grout in the wall. Still silent, Saul picked up the hose, turned the spigot, and sprayed down the part of the house where he’d struck. The he shut it off and water was still dripping from the faucet opening while he turned towards the garbage bins to toss away the bag.

“Can I bury it sir, please don’t throw it away”.

Saul looked oddly at his son because sir was not a word he liked to be called. Not even by children not his own. Sir was his own father, tucked away in a small clean room of his mind and he thought briefly of his own first such execution. His father watching pleased as his eight year old self crushed his injured pet lizard with a brick from the junk heap leftover from the construction of his own childhood home.

“Sure son”, another word he did not like to use, “But go to the side yard between the bushes. And make sure it’s covered. I don’t want your mom seeing and getting upset.”

It was very important that she was never upset.

Then he went back to his sunbathing, to relight his cigar, and little Saul Jr began the procession. Eyes watered but did not stream down because no one was there to see them. And a small thing inside him felt happy, though he wouldn’t know why for several years, because he was doing serious thing and doing it well. He used a short thick stick to dig a little hole in the earth between the holly crowded up against the wall and gently placed the plastic bag in the hole. Then crouched down to whisper:

“It’s ok little buddy. Mommy says you all go to heaven and I’m sorry your mommy pushed you out of the nest”.

He tried to think of a prayer, but couldn’t hear his own thoughts over the screaming cut grass that tickled his feet and made him feel itchy and decided that if the bird was already saved it did not really matter so he stamped down the earth with the palm of his hand. Then he took the long way inside to avoid seeing his father, and shut the door quiet so that no-one would hear.

And he showered without mommy asking, drying himself how his father had taught him. Flick out the water in smooth slicing motion before drying your hair and now step out of the tub. Put on your undies, sure the ones with the Dinos are fine. Inspect your armpits, still not a hair, take the stick swiped from Carl and apply. Two rubs under each arm just like you’ve seen me in the mirror. Feel your lips for a fuzz, hey I think I see one growing, then walk out to your room, Carl does not see you he just sprints past to the bathroom and shut locks the door. Then go to the bookshelf and pick out a good one for babies that you have not read in two years and hide in the corner and cry.           

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That evening, as the Leynes family ate quietly, phones face down in a reverent line on the island counter, soft worship music playing from the old speaker in the living room, the ants crawled back out from their subterranean homes. A new message had come, sweet flesh just there for the taking so they marched out in lines to reclaim it.  And they swarmed the baby birds grave, crossing between the toes of the neighbors outdoor cat who had also received the message. Small strips of skin stuck to its nickel plated tags, bits of cartilage pressed up into the engraved phone number to be licked clean at home when the night’s hunt was finished. And a silence fell over the ranks of homes in the neighborhood stamped out into neat, man-made lines by the mold of death that Has Not Yet Arrived. Mothers laying coldly, turned away from their husbands, hatching escape plans they’d keep locked away in their heads. Husbands awake, staring at the ceiling with knots in their stomachs they never learned how to name. No women, no men, just grown ups with titles.

And in the crook of an elm sapling a mother sparrow nestled deeper into the home that felt just a little more spacious than the night before. And the two chicks slept deeply for there had been a little more to eat that night as well.

– Cesar Ruiz

Author’s Note: I hope that the suburbs, in their soulless ubiquity, allow for a universal story.